John Updike was very very afraid of death. This is not a salutary fear,from which we may learn: he was rawly, brokenly afraid of it -- so much so that it undermines his expressed Christianity. We can see him scrabbling for palliatives among the metaphysicians and theologians, coming up temporarily soothed by this or that piece of hokum .. but he was just too honest and empirically geared to deafen himself long. His perception (thatof a great novelist) did not stop at the void before and after. I am reminded of Abbott's fallacy, 'That consciousness is a small accident / preventing bliss.'

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.